Scrum Pocket Guide

Driven by the prospect of an Italian translation of my book “Scrum – A Pocket Guide” I decided to revise it slightly; minor tweaks of words and terms, although a lot of them.

As part of my revision, I also updated the Scrum Vocabulary of my book:

Burn-down Chart: a chart showing the decrease of remaining work against time.

Burn-up Chart: a chart showing the increase of a parameter, e.g. value, against time.

Daily Scrum: a daily event, time-boxed to 15 minutes or less, to re-plan the development work during a Sprint. The event serves for the Development Team to share the daily progress, plan the work for the next 24 hours and update Sprint Backlog accordingly.

Definition of Done: a set of expectations and qualities that a product must exhibit to make it fit for a release in production.

Development standards: the set of standards and practices that a Development Team identifies as needed to create releasable Increments of product no later than by the end of a Sprint.

Development Team: the group of people accountable for all incremental development work needed to create a releasable Increment no later than by the end of a Sprint.

Emergence: the process of the coming into existence or prominence of unforeseen facts or knowledge of a fact, a previously unknown fact, or knowledge of a fact becoming visible unexpectedly.

Empiricism: the process control type in which decisions are based on observed results, experience and experimentation. Empiricism implements regular inspections and adaptations requiring and creating transparency. Also referred to as ’empirical process control’.

Forecast: the anticipation of a future trend based on observations of the past, like the selection of Product Backlog people believe they can deliver in a Sprint or in future Sprints for future Product Backlog.

Increment: a candidate of releasable work that adds to previously created Increments, and – as a whole – forms a product.

Product Backlog: an ordered, evolving list of all work deemed necessary by the Product Owner to create, maintain and sustain a product.

Product Backlog refinement: the activity in a Sprint through which the Product Owner and the Development Team add granularity to future Product Backlog.

Product Owner: the person accountable for optimising the value a product delivers by incrementally managing and expressing all product expectations and ideas in a Product Backlog; the single representative of all stakeholders.

Scrum Master: the person accountable for fostering an environment of Scrum by guiding, coaching, teaching and facilitating one or more Scrum Teams and their environment in understanding and employing Scrum.

Scrum Team: the combined roles of Product Owner, Development Team and Scrum Master.

Scrum Values: a set of 5 fundamental values and qualities underpinning the Scrum framework; commitment, focus, openness, respect and courage.

Sprint: an event that serves as a container for the other Scrum events, time-boxed to 4 weeks or less. The event serves getting a sufficient amount of work done, while ensuring timely inspection, reflection and adaptation at a product and strategic level. The other Scrum events are Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective.

Sprint Backlog: an evolving overview of the development deemed necessary to realize a Sprint’s goal.

Sprint Goal: a concise statement expressing the overarching purpose of a Sprint.

Sprint Planning: an event marking the start of a Sprint, time-boxed to 8 hours or less. The event serves for the Scrum Team to inspect the Product Backlog considered most valuable and design that forecast into an initial Sprint backlog against an overarching Sprint Goal.

Sprint Retrospective: an event marking the closing of a Sprint, time-boxed to 3 hours or less. The event serves for the Scrum Team to inspect the past Sprint and establish the way of working for the next Sprint.

Sprint Review: an event marking the closing of the development of a Sprint, time-boxed to 4 hours or less. The event serves for the Scrum Team and the stakeholders to inspect the Increment, the overall progress and strategic changes in order to allow the Product Owner to update the Product Backlog.

Stakeholder: a person external to the Scrum Team with a specific interest in or knowledge of a product that is required for the further incremental evolution of the product.

Time-box: a container in time of a maximum duration, potentially a fixed duration. In Scrum all events have a maximum duration only, except for the Sprint itself which has a fixed duration.

Velocity: popular indication of the average amount of Product Backlog turned into an Increment of releasable product during a Sprint by a specific (composition of a) Scrum Team. Serves as an aid for the Development Team of the Scrum Team to forecast future Sprints.

I look forward to the Italian version seeing the light of day in 2018. I translated my book (2013) to Dutch in 2016 as “Scrum Wegwijzer“. It was published in German as “Scrum Taschenbuch” (translated by Peter Goetz and Uwe Schirmer) in 2017.

Dear reader

Thank you for reading, sharing and promoting my pocket guide to Scrum, in its various guises (English, Dutch, paperback, digital).

I created the English version in May 2013. It was published in November 2013. I am grateful that over 10,000 (ten thousand!) copies have been sold so far. Who would have guessed back then? And the story continues. In March 2017 the German translation was published.

I would love to hear what makes my book special for you.What sticks out? What are your favourite parts? Do you have a quote to share? Share it as a comment. Share it on Twitter. Or join the Facebook page for my book.

And… take it a step further. Writing that first book was a pivotal experience. I am working on a new book, more on Scrum and the Agile way of working (what else?). Share any ideas, topics, subjects you feel are valuable for my second book.

After attending my PSM class in June 2016, Uwe Schirmer asked me whether he and Peter Götz could translate my book “Scrum – A Pocket Guide” to German. Having felt the difficulties of producing a proper-quality translation of my book in Dutch (my mother tongue) in early 2016, I warned them. To no avail. Fortunately. I am glad they persisted. In March 2017 the translated work will be released as “Scrum Taschenbuch (Ein Wegweiser für den bewussten Entdecker)” by Van Haren Publishing. Find it at their webshop or at Amazon.de.

Uwe and Peter were so kind to create following introduction, in German and in English:

(English) There is one question almost every trainer – independent of the topic at hand – will have to answer in his trainings: “What book can you recommend for this topic?” The question is not always easy to answer. For Scrum we liked to recommend Gunther’s book, which sometimes lead to the question “Is there a German version?” or “Is there another good book in German?” The answer always was “Unfortunately not”.

So when Uwe was in one of Gunther’s Scrum Master Train the Trainer courses in 2016 he had to ask him if there was a translation in progress or at least planned. Gunther said that there have been some attempts of translating the book, which had never been finished. So he asked Gunther if we (Uwe and Peter) could translate it.

It was an interesting experience. We have started work in July 2016. Of course we worked in Sprints using a task board – even though the Sprint length did not follow the Scrum Guide recommendation. After a couple of intensive iterations and content-wise refinements we have received the typeset version from our publisher. These have been 8 intensive months. Working on the book was big fun for us. We never had to force ourselves to continue working – the peer pressure in our tiny team was enough. And we also learned a lot and had many insights while working on this topic in such an advanced way, translating content and language into German.

We collaborated tightly with Gunther and discussed passages from the book and their meaning with him. Our reviewers Thomas Barber, Jean Pierre Berchez, Dominik Maximini and Anke Scheuber also did great work and gave us very valuable feedback. So did our professional editor Monika Dauer, who was able to improve the end result’s quality a lot. Thank you very much for your hard work and support. Without you we would not have been able to achieve such quality.

We hope that we can help spread and strengthen Scrum in projects and people’s heads. On that note (stolen from Gunther): (Start or) Keep Scrumming.

By the end of November 2016 the 5th re-print of my book “Scrum – A Pocket Guide” will be available, with a re-designed cover.

I wanted my book to reflect the simplicity of Scrum, a simple framework for complex product delivery.

As part of this re-print my publisher Van Haren Publishing kindly asked me to create a short video introduction to Scrum, of preferably no more than 3 minutes. The time constraint helped me focus. It helped me keeping it simple, just like Scrum.

What I say in the video was based upon following prepared text:

Scrum is a simple framework for complex product delivery.

1/ Scrum has been around for a while. It was officially introduced to the general public in 1995. Since then, as more and more people, teams and organizations started using Scrum, Scrum became the most adopted method for agile product delivery. At the same time, Scrum grew lighter and lighter, thereby, in a way becoming less and less complete and ‘perfect’. Prescribed practices and techniques were gradually removed from the official definition of Scrum, The Scrum Guide. Scrum turned into the framework it was always designed to be, a framework upon which people devise their own solutions, create their own working process. A Product Owner brings product ideas to a Development Team. No later than by the end of a Sprint the team turns these ideas into releasable versions of product. Sprints take no more than 4 weeks, and are often shorter. The Scrum Master creates and fosters an environment for such self-organised and creative collaboration to happen.

Scrum is a simple framework for complex product delivery.

2/ Scrum not only restores simplicity, Scrum brings empirical process control. All elements of Scrum support the process of regular inspection and adaptation. Empiricism is the way for people, teams and organisations to deal with the complexity, uncertainty and unpredictability typical to product development. The Scrum events set the frequency of the inspection and adaptation process. The artefacts provide transparency to all information required. As all waste has already been removed from Scrum, the framework is highly cohesive. Every element has a clear ‘why’, a clear purpose. Omitting any core elements breaks the cohesion, and is likely to cover up existing problems and impede the transparency required to continuously adapt, to be agile.

3/ Scrum, when employed well, allows a continual discovery of what is possible, what is not, of what works, what doesn’t work. Throughout this journey of discovery, the value of the work done is incrementally optimised. Product is regularly delivered to the market. It is extremely helpful to have a simple, yet proficient, tool like Scrum in highly unstable circumstances.

From March to June 2013 I created the book “Scrum – A Pocket Guide (A Smart Travel Companion)” for Van Haren Publishing (Netherlands). Although I had already written much about Scrum, it was really, really hard work. I wanted the book to be about its subject, not its writer. I wanted the book to be concise, yet complete. I wanted the book to reflect the simplicity of Scrum, in its appearance, tone, language, expressions, sentences.

Since its initial publication (November 2013) my pocket guide to Scrum was re-printed 3 times (January 2014, June 2014, November 2015). In April 2016 my Dutch translation was published as “Scrum Wegwijzer (Een kompas voor de bewuste reiziger)”. And two friends of Scrum are currently going through the really, really hard work of creating a German version, which will probably be named “Scrum Taschenbuch” and be available in 2017. And somewhere along the road I experimented with setting up a Facebook page for my book.

This is beyond any expectation I might have had handing in the first manuscript half way through 2013. I am totally humbled, and sometimes overwhelmed, by the continual appreciation of the book’s buyers and readers.

I want to share that a 5th print of the English version is on its way (end November 2016), holding a NEW COVER. The content of the book hasn’t changed. I was fortunate to have described the Scrum Values already in my book. The only change was the update to my personal history, as is also reflected on my website.

To support the update of my book, my publisher asked me to do a 3-minutes introduction to Scrum, a simple framework for complex product delivery. The time constraint helped me to keep it simple, just like Scrum.